Pancake Development Roadmap (and more)

I have been communicating with Mr. Khalil on all sorts of topics regarding Pancake – he is the author of this software. In my discussions with him I raised concerns about security and how Pancake would handle traffic, among other issues.

These issues was promptly answered and he included the Pancake development roadmap, which might be of interest. Personally, I must say, this is one project I’m definitively going to keep an eye on. I think Pancake has great potential to become something big in the future.

On my development system it has been running flawlessly, but it still needs more evaluation. In any case, it works great so far — straight out of the box

I will only attach one reply here. In this reply Mr. Khalil briefly explains the roadmap, security and more.

Hello,

Concerning your questions it might be interesting for you to know my current Pancake development roadmap. Pancake 1.3 will mainly feature some performance improvements as I am currently porting parts of Pancake from PHP to C. So far, the HTTP request parsing is more than twice as fast as in Pancake 1.2. 1.3 will probably also include support for php:// streams in the PHP SAPI, some additional improvements on rewrite rules and some small bugfixes. I’d not recommend using the master branch as I’ll soon push the first commits with the new classes in C, which might be a bit unstable at the beginning.

Pancake 1.4 will finally introduce support for HTTPS and maybe some more parts of Pancake ported to C.

1.5 will be quite a big release. I am planning on creating a web interface for Pancake that will show extensive statistics about requests including PHP profiling and debugging features, automatic CodeCache configuration and runtime configuration changes with nearly zero downtime.

At some point of time I also want to introduce some other performance improvements, especially concerning PHP. I had the ideas of creating an in-memory PHP session storage handler and offering some threading features to PHP web applications along with some more improvements.

As you can see, future versions of Pancake will offer great new features and improvements. I believe that Pancake 1.2 should easily be able to handle [DELETION] visitors per day, 1.3 even better.

Concerning security, I’ve conducted many tests with Pancake, testing several possible vulnerabilities. I believe that Pancake is safe against most forms of attacks like Slowloris for example. I just currently would not use Pancake for public hosting services as it is possible to block the RequestWorkers using manipulated PHP scripts. However, I am planning on changing the way the workers communicate with each other so that this exploit won’t be possible anymore in a future version of Pancake.

In case you have further questions, don’t hesitate to contact me again. I’d really like to see what you do with Pancake in the future.

Kind regards,
Yussuf Khalil

If you’re interested and wish to learn more about the Pancake project please have a look here: